Ever Increasing police presence

Two articles have recently caught my eye. One deals with the paranoia surrounding crime in Buenos Aires, and the government's response by deploying 2,500 gendarmerie to the south of the city. This dpeloyment is credited, in the article, with a decrease in crime in the area. Another article recounts that labor unions demanded a safe workplace, and the government responded by deploying 4,000 gendarmerie on the trains.

This deployment is part of a pattern. Often when neoliberalism arrives in a country, increased law enforcement is not far behind. The extreme inequality that accompanies the deepening of capitalism is thought to require increased policing to jail, threaten and harass the increasing unruly masses. Police are there to maintain an unequal economic order.

Their deployment is only a band-aid solution to a false problem. No, it is not even a band-aid solution, because it only increases the root cause of crime and violence. When police start arresting and disrupting communities, it worsens the cycle of poverty, reducing opportunities, empowerment and creating desperation. Deploying police is rash and based in fear. These decisions will not solve the issue of crime, but instead intensify the desperation to climb out of poverty, by any means necessary.

A more effective solution to reducing crime would be to reduce inequality. If people have their basic needs met, they have reduced incentives to steal. Reducing inequality can be accomplished through any number of means: income caps, wealth redistribution, socializing sectors of the economy (or the whole economy)

Police deployment increases inequality, reduces human rights and normalizes the militarization of everyday life. It is indeed sad that, albeit not surprising, that states are increasingly following the "New York consensus" with regard to increased policing and incarceration.

For more information on the subject see: Loic Wacquants Three Steps to a historical anthroology of actually existing neoliberlism

And the news articles:  http://www.argentinaindependent.com/currentaffairs/nilda-garre-no-increase-in-crime-in-buenos-aires/

http://www.argentinaindependent.com/currentaffairs/newsfromargentina/four-hundred-gendarmes-to-patrol-buenos-aires-train-lines/